Jean's Journal: The Way We Were
by Jean Farrell
I’ve read that the world didn’t change much between 1900 and 1960. The same attitudes and values prevailed throughout those 60 years.
However, as you are very well aware, enormous changes have taken place since. This is brought home to me every day.
Last week I met a woman I know who has three small children. She is living with their father for the last ten years. The woman stopped me to tell me her great news. She announced that they had gotten engaged. She showed me her ring and told me that they are planning a big wedding soon.
How different it was in our day. How very, very different everything was.
I’ll start with attitudes towards sex. Sex education is now taught in schools. One of the main aims of the programme is to give the students a positive attitude towards their sexuality.
Negativity towards the whole subject is what we picked up. Our sex education, or lack of it, centred on the following language. Mortal sin, living-in-sin, shame, purity, the Devil, Hell-fire, the sixth commandment, occasions-of-sin, immodest dress, virginity, Purgatory, sins-of-the flesh, bad companions, illegitimacy, Saint Maria Goretti, Angela McNamara, modesty, Satan, suggestive magazines, self-denial, The Holy Souls, Hell, sin, unmarried mothers’ homes, vocations, heavy petting, chastity, indecent conversations, books, plays and pictures.
Think of young people you know. Maybe you’d read those words again. I’m sure you will agree that most people under 40 have never heard of most of them.
In our day, armed with all these negative notions, as well as ferocious fear of Hell, this is how we proceeded with our lives.
First, we set out to meet our man. Dances were the order of the day. The famous showbands played in the dance-halls where we had great times.
We met our fellow and went on dates to the pictures. Some may have gone to pubs, depending on your ages. Very few homes had telephones so young people often had to queue, with many others, at public phone boxes, in order to organise dates with a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Eventually we fell in love and got engaged. A wedding was planned. If your sister got engaged at the same time, ye may even have decided to have a double-wedding! Remember those?
The concept of ‘The Wedding Breakfast’ stems from the time, before 1957, when one had to abstain from food from midnight in order to receive Holy Communion the following morning. This would have applied to our parents’ weddings. From 1964, the rule was changed to one hour’s fasting.
Back then, the wedding ceremony took place early in the morning. Immediately afterwards, they and their (hungry) guests partook of The Wedding Breakfast. I remember couples heading to the railway station, from the hotel. The new bride would be proudly wearing her ‘Going Away Outfit’. The wedding party accompanied the bride and groom to the station to see them off on the train.
The couple went to a hotel in Ireland on their honeymoon. For some, it was their first time ever in a hotel. A woman told me that her brand new husband had a car, so they drove to Ballybunion. He was so very uncomfortable being in a hotel that he spent most of their honeymoon sitting outside in his car, in the hotel carpark. His brand new wife had expected that he’d be sitting with her, in the hotel lounge, in her new costume! How very sad!
After a week away couples returned home. Then, and only then, did they move into a flat and live together. No-one we knew ‘lived-in-sin’ back then.
Young married couples set up their new home so it was much easier to buy wedding presents for them than nowadays. They got Constellation sheets, dinner services, candlewick spreads, eiderdown, sets of china and more.
Most newly married couples didn’t get loans, they waited until they could afford basic furniture. Many a kitchen was fitted out with the aid of green-shield stamps.
We had to wait a week or two to see our wedding photographs.
When a lot of us got married we were told that, if it was God’s will, our marriage would be ‘blessed’ with children. He’d decide how many!
Contraceptives were not available. They were banned by church and state. It wasn’t until 1979 that a doctor could prescribe them to a married woman, and only to a married woman.
This was marvellous, absolutely marvellous. We had control of our fertility, at long, long last. We didn’t have to give birth to numerous children, like our mothers did.
A friend told me recently that, after being six months married, she told her mother that she was now pregnant. Her mother’s reply was, “So am I.” Her daughter was born on the same day as her sister. This was her mother’s fourteenth birth.
As pregnant women, we wore big loose dresses, unlike nowadays!
These are just some of the many changes that have taken place in our lives.
I was born in 1951. For the most formative years of my life, I was educated in the old ways – the ways all those born since 1900 were. The church ruled supreme and we questioned nothing.
Then, when we finally left the nuns and went out into the big wide world, we discovered that all the rules had changed. The 1960s had happened. Most of what we had learnt from the nuns didn’t apply anymore. The message from the 1970s was “All you need is love.”
In my next few articles, I am going to write about many of the changes we have lived through.
jeanfarrell@live.ie